Abstract

Through a comparison of two short-stories, Hjalmar Söderberg's classic "Tuschritningen" [The pen-and-ink-drawing] (1897) and the working-class writer Alfred Kämpe's "Hjälpareflickorna" [The helper girls], (1907) Ekholm discusses ideas of the early 1900s concerning working-class literature, related to the work of art as a situated event. Söderberg describes this event as a gender- and class-based clash between two opposite attitudes, and renders the rhetorical-political stance of the depicted working girl secondary and strange in relation to the aesthetical-existential posture of the male bourgeois narrator-protagonist. Kämpe, on the other hand, uses the literary strategy typical of working-class literature to highlight the toil of the outlined harvest, and especially the exposed situation of one of the working girls, in terms of an exigence or social need – a need the short-story itself responds to by rhetorically and politically making an alternative world.